Abstract: The resource discovery is a key problem in wide-area distributed systems, such as computational grid, Web services, and peer-to-peer. It has great impact on the efficiency of the resource sharing and collaborating in such environments. Based on previous work on Vega grid, the key issues of resource discovery are discussed. A layered architecture of the Vega grid resource discovery mechanism, and the functionality of each layer and its implementation are described. The analysis and experiment results show that this mechanism has the following features: having good resource locating performance and scalability in grid environments; being adapted to the dynamic of grid resources; being able to solve the load balance in resource discovery process, and accommodating various grid resources and applications.